It’s Pi Day — the possibilities are infinite!

Slice out some time to celebrate Pi Day today, 3/14. Pic courtesy of anewdomain.net

Our friend and colleague Gina Smith at tech news and analysis site anewdomain.net is many things: a journalist, an entrepreneur, a bon vivant … and a big math nerd. She shot us an urgent note to remind us that today — 3/14 — is Pi Day.

Pi, of course, is the number you get when you calculate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (duh!). It’s a number with infinite places, but mostly rounded off (for those high school geometry problems) as 3.14. Thus today’s celebration.

In S.F., the folks at San Francisco’s Exploratorium annually celebrate this mathematical marvel, one, Smith points out, that the Babylonians, Egyptians and even the Bible mention several centuries before the ancient Greek Archimedes of Syracuse began successfully promoting it around 260 B.C.

“The Exploratorium folks do a pi dance, do pi beading, have a pi channel, a pi shrine,” Gina says in an annual post on her site. (We think there’s actual pie on hand, too.) “It’s just a little out of hand — but if you love math, you love Pi Day.”

And Gina really loves pi, enough that she’s collected every fact about it — and Pi Day — you could ever wish to know. For example: March 14 is also the birthdate of Albert Einstein. You can learn them all here and amaze your friends.

Slice yourself a nice piece of pie and start reciting pi out as many decimal places as you can: 3.141592653589 … Take your time. There are at least 6.4 billion digits, enough to keep you going at least until 3/14/14.

And if, like Gina, you are super-nerdy, you’ll also want to check out the cool graphic the A New Domain team put together on all things pi: